# Southern Accent Hypothesis and Question **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 26, 2012, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168 "2012-05-26T14:23:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 5:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/21 "2012-05-28T05:57:17Z")
> [@al27052](#): > > Have you been there? No? Are you a degreed linguist? No? > > Like I said in the above post, I had to listen for several minutes VERY carefully before I felt reasonably sure that it wasn’t an EXACT copy of some British Isles accent. I’m from North Carolina, am familiar with quite a few of its regional and class-based subdialects, and I’ve watched more than enough British TV and movies to have heard quite a few different regional accents from there as well. > > I listen carefully to accents, can imitate them quite well, and also have worked for years in call centers. I talk to people from all over the world and the US, and using their accent, I can identify someone’s location to a specific region of their state, quite often. > > Using accents, I can hear the difference between Minnesota and Wisconsin, the difference between eastern and western Oregon/Washington, and the difference between east and west Texas. I can pin down someone’s location by COUNTY in my part of North Carolina, quite often, and I can pin down someone’s social class in North Carolina within 3-5 words, 80% of the time. > > Identifying regional US accents is a hobby of mine, because call center work is generally not mentally stimulating, and it helps pass the time at work. > > So please feel free to dispute me using your lack of degree, lack of experience with this particular regional accent of a specific part of coastal NC, and lack of expertise with accents, mmkay? Well, rather than offering us your personal anecdotes. give us a cite. We have these threads every few months, and someone always comes along with this folk-knowledge either about those folks or the people on Tangier Island in Virginia. I’ve never heard an actual linguist agree with this folk knowledge. ---
**Author:** ![al27052](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/41988e/32.png) [@al27052](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/al27052)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/22 "2012-05-28T06:10:39Z")
Fair enough. Truthfully, here’s what I found so far– I thought all those coastal North Carolinians had pretty similar accents, but they don’t. Ocracokers sound pretty Southern, but Outer Banks people sound much more British. here’s a youtube video, try to listen to the whole thing, there’s some variation among these speakers: [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/jgi9wYsR5fo/hqdefault.jpg "The Carolina Brogue: Outer Banks Vocabulary") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgi9wYsR5fo) But neither the Ocracokers nor the Outer Banks people sound like this one old carpenter I saw on PBS one time, on the local UNC-TV affiliate. I literally thought he was British for about 90 seconds, until I heard a word or two that didn’t sound quite British. My guess is that the younger generation in some of these remote areas has picked up the semi-generic “North Carolina redneck accent” through tourism and travel to other parts of NC, as well as simple intermarriage. However, there are definitely some members of the older generation still left who _really_ sound almost perfectly British, I guarantee it. ---
**Author:** ![al27052](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/41988e/32.png) [@al27052](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/al27052)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/23 "2012-05-28T06:16:57Z")
[![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/jXs9cf2YWwg/hqdefault.jpg "Outer Banks English") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXs9cf2YWwg) That’s a much better example of what I’m talking about. I couldn’t tell you WHERE in the British Isles that accent’s from, but, by gosh, it’s extremely similar to the accent of _somewhere_ there. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![al27052](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/41988e/32.png) [@al27052](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/al27052)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/24 "2012-05-28T06:29:03Z")
And not all North Carolinians, or all Southerners, are stupid. I was a National Merit Scholar, and I can hold my own in most hard science discussions with doctoral candidates in the hard sciences. The sneaky subtext here is that Southerners-are-just-stupid-and-the-way-they-talk-is-perfectly-correlated-with-their-stupidity. I don’t appreciate the implied insult. In point of _fact_, the differences between British accents and Southern accent(s) are easily attributable to African influences. So no, not all Southerners are slack-jawed morons. We didn’t somehow pervert the British accents of our ancestors through simple stupidity, or any other type of personal or character flaws. I am up against ignorance here. I mean, sure, I also have the tendency assumptions about someone’s intelligence based on their accent, and all kinds of other assumptions about their character, too. I, however, am AWARE that I tend to do this, and keep a sharp eye on myself, for fear I’ll assume the wrong thing. Emphasis on the “ASS” in assume. Yes, even I tend to assume people with Southern accents are stupid, even as I have one myself. I’m aware of the assumption, though, and I know it doesn’t always hold true. ---
**Author:** ![al27052](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/41988e/32.png) [@al27052](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/al27052)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 6:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/25 "2012-05-28T06:35:13Z")
I’m roughly as touchy about this as an African-American who deals with people that assume he and all his race are hubcap-stealing, jive-talking, cop-hating, baggy-panted welfare recipients and prison inmates. And I’m sure some of you who’ve lived in all-white towns and neighborhoods assume exactly that. It doesn’t make it true. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 12:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/26 "2012-05-28T12:44:07Z")
> [@al27052](#): > > I’m roughly as touchy about this… I’ll say! There’s nothing in this thread about “stupid”, or anything like that. Please correct me if I’m wrong. You’re simply incorrect about your “point of fact”. (THere is likely some African influence, but how much is debated, and it’s certainly much less influential than certain 17th-18th-century regional British Isles accents, plus random drift since then.) I think you might be conflusing “language change” with something bad (you used the word “perversion”.) No person educated in basic lingusitics thinks that way, so you needn’t worry. The “posh” British accent of the mid-20th-to-early-21st century is just one accent, as subject to change as any other. ---
**Author:** ![al27052](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/41988e/32.png) [@al27052](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/al27052)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/27 "2012-05-28T13:17:25Z")
> [@JKellyMap](#): > > I’ll say! There’s nothing in this thread about “stupid”, or anything like that. Please correct me if I’m wrong. > > You’re simply incorrect about your “point of fact”. (THere is likely some African influence, but how much is debated, and it’s certainly much less influential than certain 17th-18th-century regional British Isles accents, plus random drift since then.) > > I think you might be conflusing “language change” with something bad (you used the word “perversion”.) No person educated in basic lingusitics thinks that way, so you needn’t worry. The “posh” British accent of the mid-20th-to-early-21st century is just one accent, as subject to change as any other. No person educated in basic linguistics thinks that way? Fine, I concede the possibility. However, I really wonder what percentage of Dopers even had 1 class in linguistics, or have read even one scholarly book about it. And I’m not calling Dopers “stupid”, either. I’m just saying that the prevailing baseline automatic assumption about Southern accents is that they are proof of all sorts of bad qualities including stupidity, lack of education, racism, etc.. I’m also saying it can be tough to combat these assumptions sometimes. I’m ALSO saying that, absent basic linguistic knowledge, such assumptions as I mentioned, specifically that Southern accents are 100% correlated with character flaws, stupidity, etc., might obscure the facts here. I’m not saying they ARE obscuring at the moment; I’m making a point, generally speaking, that they MIGHT. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/28 "2012-05-28T13:35:08Z")
> [@al27052](#): > > No person educated in basic linguistics thinks that way? Fine, I concede the possibility. However, I really wonder what percentage of Dopers even had 1 class in linguistics, or have read even one scholarly book about it. > > And I’m not calling Dopers “stupid”, either. I’m just saying that the prevailing baseline automatic assumption about Southern accents is that they are proof of all sorts of bad qualities including stupidity, lack of education, racism, etc.. I’m also saying it can be tough to combat these assumptions sometimes. > > I’m ALSO saying that, absent basic linguistic knowledge, such assumptions as I mentioned, specifically that Southern accents are 100% correlated with character flaws, stupidity, etc., might obscure the facts here. I’m not saying they ARE obscuring at the moment; I’m making a point, generally speaking, that they MIGHT. Okay, point taken. You’re right that all of us, no matter how well trained in linguistcs, can’t help but associate certain accents with certain socioeconomic/cultural traits, and that many of us then associate those traits with levels of “intelligence” (whatever that means.) And, it’s true that a lot of media and entertainment will use a rural southern/Appalachian accents to evoke the lack of education/worldly exposure, which is correlated with (though not 100% so) rural upbringing in general. And, so, urban/suburban (and therefore, more likely to be highly educated and worldly) Southerners, whose accent shares many traits with the rural Southern/Appalachian one, will – by indirect association – be thought of as “stupid” by some percentage of people. I really think that the percentage of people who think this is small. Most of us feel _reassured_ when we hear the pilot come on the intercom with a gentle drawl. But maybe I’m too optimistic. After all, it’s easy for ME to say – I can’t put myself totally in your shoes – though I’m sure my New Yawk pronunciation of the word “coffee” has made some folks assume I’m “pushy”, or whatever it is they associate New Yorkers with these days. ---
**Author:** ![Beware\_of\_Doug](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/278dde/32.png) [@Beware\_of\_Doug](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beware_of_Doug)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/29 "2012-05-28T13:39:02Z")
Personally, I associate the New York accent with someone who is intelligent, maybe even discerning and sophisticated, but who never bothered to class it up. Now imagine that person replicated into a 2nd, or 3rd, or nth generation. New Yawk is the only speech in the US which is associated with intelligence and upward mobility that doesn’t _sound_ like it. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/30 "2012-05-28T14:01:53Z")
> [@al27052](#): > > No person educated in basic linguistics thinks that way? Fine, I concede the possibility. However, I really wonder what percentage of Dopers even had 1 class in linguistics, or have read even one scholarly book about it. We have several posters here who have degrees in linguistics. And many of us have taken courses and/or read scholarly books on the subject. As for the southern accent = stupid meme, I don’t see anyone ( other than you) discussing it in this thread. All accents change over time, and while it’s a quaint notion that there is some relic of 17th century English hidden away in the US, it simply doesn’t stand up to scholarly scrutiny. ---
**Author:** ![al27052](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/41988e/32.png) [@al27052](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/al27052)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/31 "2012-05-28T14:54:10Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > We have several posters here who have degrees in linguistics. And many of us have taken courses and/or read scholarly books on the subject. > > As for the southern accent = stupid meme, I don’t see anyone ( other than you) discussing it in this thread. > > All accents change over time, and while it’s a quaint notion that there is some relic of 17th century English hidden away in the US, it simply doesn’t stand up to scholarly scrutiny. All 3 claims are obvious BS. 1. Where are the linguists? Show me them. They certainly are nowhere near this thread. 2. I might have been the first person talking about it, but your implication that no one else here has thought what I was saying is silly. 3. Did you even click on my youtube links? Especially the second one. They both include a lot of the same people, but the first speaker on the second link is pretty close to what I’m talking about. Granted, if you listen for a minute or so, you can tell he’s not British/Irish, but there are a LOT of words he says that are pretty indistinguishable from…well, SOMEwhere in the British Isles. ---
**Author:** ![TATG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/50afbb/32.png) [@TATG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TATG)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/32 "2012-05-28T15:19:15Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > All accents change over time, and while it’s a quaint notion that there is some relic of 17th century English hidden away in the US, it simply doesn’t stand up to scholarly scrutiny. > [@al27052](#): > > 1. Did you even click on my youtube links? Especially the second one. They both include a lot of the same people, but the first speaker on the second link is pretty close to what I’m talking about. Granted, if you listen for a minute or so, you can tell he’s not British/Irish, but there are a LOT of words he says that are pretty indistinguishable from…well, SOMEwhere in the British Isles. For this to be a rebuttal you would at least need to show that such a British Isles accent is the same as some 17th century accent. ---
**Author:** ![Attack\_from\_the\_3rd\_dimension](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b38774/32.png) [@Attack\_from\_the\_3rd\_dimension](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Attack_from_the_3rd_dimension)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/33 "2012-05-28T15:39:10Z")
> [@al27052](#): > > I’m roughly as touchy about this as an African-American who deals with people that assume he and all his race are hubcap-stealing, jive-talking, cop-hating, baggy-panted welfare recipients and prison inmates. > > And I’m sure some of you who’ve lived in all-white towns and neighborhoods assume exactly that. It doesn’t make it true. As someone from North Carolina, I can say with authority that I think you should have a little lie-down. This isn’t worth going nuclear. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/34 "2012-05-28T16:36:09Z")
You want to know where the linguists are? Well, I have a master’s degree in linguistics. (Yeah, I also have a master’s degree in math. I was never very good at sticking to just one subject.) I’m not an expert in historical linguistics though, let alone in the history of the Southern American dialect. If you want the current, detailed history of that dialect, you’re going to have to talk to someone in a linguistics department who specializes in that. In any case, what anyone with some knowledge of linguistics can tell you is that there aren’t really cases of dialects which don’t change over hundreds of years. They may change a little more slowly perhaps, but they do change. So there isn’t any current dialect that sounds just like any British accent from just before they started settling what’s now the U.S. What caused the various accents in the U.S. to change from whatever British settlers ended up in their area is hard to tell. Some of it depends on what part of the U.K. those settlers came from. Some of it depends on what other places there were settlers from (including those brought as slaves). Some of it was just spontaneous change in the U.S. that wasn’t particularly influenced by other things. It’s much harder than you might think to listen to a strange dialect and tell where it comes from. People do sometimes misidentify a dialect as British even though it’s from somewhere else. Identifying dialects is hard work. No linguist would ever assume that the speakers of a dialect are ignorant because they talk that way. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/35 "2012-05-28T16:38:06Z")
> [@al27052](#): > > All 3 claims are obvious BS. > > 1. Where are the linguists? Show me them. They certainly are nowhere near this thread. Cool your jets, dude. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is a fact that there are people on this MB with degrees in linguistics. The only BS I’m seeing right now is coming from you: > [@al27052](#): > > I think it’s odd that people often think that the British accent doesn’t survive unchanged in the Americas. Around Ocracoke, it pretty much does. Give it up. We’re in GQ, not IMHO. That is factually incorrect, even if we grant you the license of the weasel words “pretty much”. > [@](#): > > 1. I might have been the first person talking about it, but your implication that no one else here has thought what I was saying is silly. I didn’t imply any such thing, and I don’t see the merit of discussing what people might be thinking. > [@](#): > > 1. Did you even click on my youtube links? Especially the second one. They both include a lot of the same people, but the first speaker on the second link is pretty close to what I’m talking about. Granted, if you listen for a minute or so, you can tell he’s not British/Irish, but there are a LOT of words he says that are pretty indistinguishable from…well, SOMEwhere in the British Isles. Yes, I did, and they don’t sound remotely British to me. They sound southern, with a few odd (for southerners) pronunciations thrown in. In fact that very link talks about how the accent has changed over time. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/36 "2012-05-28T18:16:41Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Well, I have a master’s degree in linguistics. (Yeah, I also have a master’s degree in math. I was never very good at sticking to just one subject.) Hmmm. In biology there are mathematical models of evolution that take into account genetic drift, founder effects, population bottleneck effects, selective effects, interbreeding rates, and so on. Often a particular allele can be track over time and its frequency over or below what would be expected within a range allowed for by genetic drift used as evidence that some other of those factors is at play. As someone well trained in both mathematics and linguistics, are you are of similar sorts of models being applied to dialect characteristics? (Not necessarily specific to Southern American English and Modern British English both evolving from a common set of dialects in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although obviously such a model could have applicability there.) ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/37 "2012-05-28T18:56:56Z")
No, sorry, I don’t know of any such models. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/38 "2012-05-28T19:30:14Z")
Well it seems like there should be, and that someone versed in both, like you, could create it. In your spare time, of course. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Lukeinva](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lukeinva/32/17872_2.png) [@Lukeinva](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lukeinva)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/39 "2012-05-28T22:01:21Z")
Snip… > [@Lamia](#): > > The idea is not that American Southern accents (there are more than one) Indeed, and there are variations of accents within the same state. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2012, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168/40 "2012-05-28T22:11:40Z")
When I lived in England, I heard dialects that were very similar to Southern US, particularly south of London and in the West Country. The most distinctive feature of these was their drawl. The more isolated a speech community, the less it will deviate from its parent variant (in theory, anyway). There are areas in the Appalachians where the people still speak a dialect almost indistinguishable from Shakespeare’s English. The English/Scottish/Irish migration and settlement patterns of the American South have been fairly well established and can be found in any good book on historical linguistics. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/southern-accent-hypothesis-and-question/623168.md?page=3)